Pretty amazing to this production by NYT. Would be great if more self-critical content like this would surface from both sides of the divide. The key takeaway - It's easy to stand for liberal values as long as you don't have to walk the talk while being very affluent. From casual observation we know that money and power change people - even when its not on the scale of the super-elite. Just moving up the social ladder a few rungs from where you started out is enough for that. No surprise that people would like to protect those gains and not want to careen down. Presumably the higher you make it greater is this fear and stronger the impulse to protect what was "won" or "earned". This is not to say everyone who arrives in life forgets where they came from and shove their values down the toilet but it change is quite common.
The discussion about the zoning laws in Palo Alto got me thinking about the refugee tenement flat my grandmother came to as new bride. She died in the same place sixty some years later. Back in the 1940s the place was considered a distant suburb of Kolkata no one want to live in. It was where they set up the refugees. By the 1980s that had completely changed and her tiny flat was worth a good bit of money and it rent controlled. Every resident there has clung to their property for generations, with children and grandchildren paying rents that are orders of magnitude lower than anything in that neighborhood. They refuse to sell the place even if no one lives there. The building is an eye-sore and has been for decades now but the landlord's family has yet to come up with a number that will incentivize these folks to move. This this the 4th generation in charge after my grandparent's time.
Very far and a world apart in every way from Palo Alto but these residents have enjoyed tremendous appreciation in the value of a property they don't even own and thanks to archaic laws they cannot be evicted without being paid very large sums of money the landlord cannot afford. My grandmother loved visiting us in the summer. We lived in semi-rural community, the houses were scattered and there was a lot of greenery. That is the living she enjoyed and dreamed of and yet no force on earth could move her out of that shabby flat she lived in. It was matter of principle to her - one I never got
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